The idea of the NEST meetings was hatched over breakfast in New Orleans at the November 1990 meeting of the Psychonomics Society. Charles Collyer, David Rosenbaum, Jonathan Vaughan, and Daniel Willingham, all of whom were then working in the greater New England area, decided to get together soon at a place closer to home and discuss their research. This they did in January of 1991 in Amherst. The NEST acronym, which invokes the hierarchically nested structure of rhythms and sequences, was coined at this first informal meeting. The second NEST meeting was already more structured, and gradually the meetings reached their current size of about 40 attendees. The first four meetings were held at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, organized by David Rosenbaum. After his departure for Penn State in the summer of 1994, Charles Collyer hosted the next five meetings at Brown University in Providence. Bruno Repp took over as organizer in 2000, with meetings being held first at Yale University and more recently at Haskins Laboratories in New Haven. In 1998, a book edited by Rosenbaum and Collyer was published which is known informally as "The Best of NEST." To view its contents, click here. |
